The International Labour Office defines child labor as “work that deprives children of their childhood, potential and dignity” and that is “harmful to (their) physical and mental development.” Last summer I started tracking this trend after seeing research reports about child labor in the United States in the professional and academic literature. If you had asked me before that if such exploitation of children existed in America I would have said, "No, that was all outlawed in the early years of the 20th century." And I would have been wrong, as this report spells out. Even more disgusting is the linkage between children being made to work in factories and slaughterhouses, and the actions of the Republican Party to make this possible. I just can't process this, have we really sunk back to this level? Apparently, we have.
A grim truth underlies U.S. industry: the appalling practice of child labor, widely perceived as an anachronism, is far from a thing of the sooty industrial past. U.S. consumers may have a hazy sense that children labor somewhere in foreign sweatshops to manufacture their goods — but such faraway tragedies are too easily forgotten at the checkout.
But child labor persists domestically as well. Because the practice has long been obscured from view, recent exposures of its real scope have elicited public surprise. In the past year, journalistic and governmental investigations of Southern manufacturers turned up systematic violations, while in February, The New York Times published a powerful exposé that highlighted migrant children who’d been steered into grueling work in manufacturing and agriculture. Still, these were mere glimpses. In the last fiscal year alone, the Department of Labor discovered 835 companies illegally employing more than 3,800 minors.
Those figures are startling enough — but the actual extent of legal U.S. child labor is truly vast. At present, enormous numbers of minors, many of them migrant children, are legally employed […]
Public schools were the key to creating the American middle class, and why the United States became the world leader in technological and medical development. Now all that is being dismantled by a Republican Party that seeks indoctrination of children not their education. The long term consequences of this are going to be disastrous and will redefine the nation. Teachers are quitting in droves because it is a hard job under the best of circumstances and now education is being defined by politicians not educators, and poorly educated ideologically MAGAt parents -- witness what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
American classroom Credit: istock
Two out of five schoolchildren have experienced learning loss over the past few years – and parents are worried that teacher shortages might be the cause, according to new research.
A recent survey asked 1,500 parents to comment on the current state of their local school district, finding that 71 percent believe their child’s education has been impacted by nationwide staffing shortages.
Respondents cited a lack of qualified teachers as their top concern (40%), almost twice as much as shortages in support staff members like nurses, janitorial crew, and administrators (25%).
Three in four (77%) are also concerned about ongoing staffing shortages across the nation, which half (48%) have already experienced at their own child’s school.
What challenges are students facing?
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Study.com, the survey also found that three in four parents feel their child has been facing setbacks at school as a result. In addition to learning loss (42%), having trouble concentrating (30%), coming […]
“Stand by Me,” a study of American teachers conducted by Public Agenda (a nonpartisan, nonprofit public opinion research and citizen education organization based in New York City) reports that 76 percent of teachers surveyed believe they are “the scapegoats for all the problems facing education” and often feel that they must teach children lessons they should be learning from parents at home.
“I have to teach them manners, respect, how to tie their shoes, what their last name is, what their phone number is. These kids come into first-grade not knowing that,” said one teacher of her middle-class students. High school teachers battle a crippling lack of civility and respect amongst their students,and 4 out of 10 “spend more time trying to keep order in the classroom than teaching students.”
Their sounding plea to parents: Teach basic life skills and manners at every opportunity. Team up with your teachers whenever possible to work out classroom problems. If you don’t model respect for your child’s educators, your child won’t care about listening to them in the classroom.
Libraries are one of the most important educational assets a community can have. Personally, much of my education came from borrowing books from the public library. Benjamin Franklin understood this, and so did Thomas Jefferson. But apparently, MAGAt Republicans do not.
All across the Red states MAGAts are trying to gut the public and school libraries removing anything their weak ideologically constrained minds find objectionable. Rosa Parks was a Black woman, no, no, I don't want my kids to be taught that. The IQ of Americans is going down for the first time in a century, and a lower percentage of Americans are considered educated and capable of passing an 8th grade exam given out to children in 1895 in a Kansas one-room schoolhouse than in the MAGAt's grandparents' generation. MAGAt world is made up of non-college educated White people making $50,000 dollars or less. Easily manipulated with disinformation, particularly when their racial and gender fears are stimulated.
Missouri lawmakers on Thursday moved to strip state funding from public libraries in retaliation for a lawsuit challenging a new state law that bans certain materials in school libraries. Credit: Shane Keyser / Kansas City Star / TNS
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri lawmakers late Thursday evening moved to strip state funding from public libraries in retaliation for a lawsuit challenging a new state law that bans certain materials in school libraries.
The proposal, approved close to midnight by the House Budget Committee, would cut the entire $4.5 million in state aid that libraries were slated to get next year. The proposed library cut, along with other changes to the state’s roughly $50 billion budget, will now head to the full Missouri House.
“They are seeking to overturn that law that was unanimously supported by the House,” said state Rep. Cody Smith, a Carthage Republican and chair of the committee who proposed the cut. “I don’t think we should subsidize that.”
Healthcare in the United States, because it is all about profit not wellbeing, is becoming so distorted, and the American social outcome data is so poor compared with other democratic nations, that finally the medical community is beginning to recognize that something must be done. None of this will be surprising to my readers, I have been saying these things for decades.
A new Series published in The Lancet describes how, although commercial entities can contribute positively to health and society, the products and practices of some commercial actors are responsible for escalating rates of avoidable ill health, planetary damage, and social and health inequity. Authors make key recommendations to ensure that contemporary capitalism is compatible with good population health.
The industries that produce just four harmful products—tobacco, alcohol, unhealthy food, and fossil fuels—account for at least a third of global deaths, illustrating the scale and huge economic cost of the problem.
Professor Rob Moodie, Series Lead and Professor of Public Health Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, says, “We all want to be part of a society that’s safe, happy and healthy but this will only happen when governments make the health of people and the planet a higher priority than profit. This series isn’t anti-business, it’s pro-health. It’s important that we acknowledge that many businesses play vital roles in society, but we also need to recognize the practices and products of some are making people […]
